The $10 billion idea everyone ignored

It was a Saturday morning, and Maya had finally unpacked. After the blur of boxes and the muttered I'll never buy this many books again, the apartment was starting to feel like hers. 

She grabbed her keys and headed out to meet the new neighborhood. Her friends had insisted it was worth the price, because it had subway access, good restaurants, a farmers' market on weekends, and a building on the Bilt network. She'd signed up when she accepted the lease, almost without thinking about it.  

Now, every month when she paid rent on time, she earned points. These points were also earned at the coffee shop she was walking toward, the Walgreens down the street, the Soul Cycle studio she kept meaning to try, or saved up for a flight or hotel stay she'd been putting off.

Her last apartment had given her nothing but a receipt. This one was giving Maya a neighborhood and helping her build a credit score that, somewhere down the line, would help her own a place.

It seems so simple now, but getting there took nearly a decade, a regulatory battle in Washington, two years of pitching and receiving nos, as well as one stubborn founder who refused to accept that the biggest expense in a generation's life should count for nothing.

This is how Bilt got built.

Welcome back.

Every other Thursday, Zero to Unicorn shares the life stories of billion-dollar founders, investors, and operators.

Join us at our upcoming events.

• Tues. May 26 - Founding GPs VC Omakase (Boston)

• Wed. May 27 - AI Champions Dinner (Boston)

• Tues. June 2 - Founding GPs VC Omakase (New York)

• Wed. June 3 - AI Day (New York)

  • Bolt Founder Fireside

  • Becoming an AI Champion Fireside

  • Graphite Founder Fireside

  • AI Champions Dinner

  • The Afterparty ft. Ian Asher

• Tues. June 23 - AI Champions Dinner (San Francisco)

Ethan and Arek 🦄

Today, Bilt is a $10 billion company with a network of more than 50,000 merchants. It’s founded by Ankur Jain, who is a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader and a Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania graduate. He was also named by Inc. magazine as the "Best Connected 21-Year-Old in the World". And, he has accomplished all this at a time when most people around him were still trying to figure out what they wanted to do with their lives. But to understand how he got there, let’s rewind time and begin with his parents.

Ankur’s father, Naveen Jain, came from a poor village in rural India and earned his way into the Indian Institute of Technology, one of the most prestigious academic institutions in the world. There, the PC revolution taking place gave him a path to something bigger. In 1983, he came to the U.S. on a business exchange program. 

This same relentless will to turn ideas into reality was a constant in his life. It showed up again, maybe most memorably, right after his wedding. Ankur’s mother, Anu Jain, had grown up in Israel, and neither she nor Naveen could have imagined where they'd end up spending their first days as a married couple. 

That’s because, with no money for a honeymoon, his father had a… how can we put it? A singular idea. 

The logic was, if he sent his resume to twenty companies in cities across the U.S., and even one of them flew him out for an interview, he'd have his trip destination. 

Long story short, in 1989, a company in Seattle called Microsoft (already one of the fastest-growing tech businesses in the country) responded. He went for the interview, and the couple had their honeymoon in Seattle. That's where Ankur was born. And what started as a honeymoon turned into a career, because Naveen would stay at Microsoft for nearly seven years, eventually rising to group manager of MSN.  

This figure-it-out mentality that brought Naveen to the U.S. would drive him to found InfoSpace in 1996, one of the pioneering companies of the early internet era, and later to launch ventures in space and health, such as MoonExpress and Viome. He became the kind of entrepreneur who goes looking for problems that nobody else has tried to solve properly.

Like father, like son, they say. That’s because it's hard to outrun the household you grew up in. For Ankur, this meant inheriting an instinct to solve problems with anything within reach, not waiting for the ideal context. And that’s what he did at an early age.  

Ankur grew up in an immigrant-parents household where asking to buy something was, by his own description, like “triggering an allergic reaction”. So, if he wanted anything, he had to figure out how to build or barter his way to it. Around 11 years old, convinced by a late-night TV ad that a pair of $140 plyometric jump shoes would let him dunk a basketball and make the school team, he built a website to get those shoes.

It had quizzes, AIM profile tools… to him, it was enough of a product to cold-call the company's customer service line and ask to speak to the CMO. He kept calling until someone actually put him through. There, he landed his first ever deal: an ad placement on his site in exchange for a free pair of shoes. The shoes did not make him dunk, but the deal-making instinct and the reflex to find a way through any problem stuck.   

Clearly, it didn't come from nowhere. The fire that Ankur’s father carried from a small village in India all the way to a Microsoft office in Seattle never really went out. That serial entrepreneurship passion for solving problems would be imprinted on his children, all of whom would become entrepreneurs and important figures, and that’s how Ankur would build companies of his own.

But before that, he'd spend two years working for someone else's company, something he had never done before and would never do again.  

You're at a rooftop bar in Austin. You meet someone, exchange numbers, and maybe promise to grab coffee. Life moves on. Three months later, their name pops up on your phone, and you have no idea who they are. Is it an old friend from school? The friend of a friend who could help you land a new job? Ankur knew that feeling, and it was one of the first problems he tried to solve by co-founding Humin right out of Wharton. 

Humin was a contacts app he describes as a better version of LinkedIn, built around your phonebook, not a website. It helps you remember people by cross-referencing your calendar, social apps, and location to give you contextual awareness of the people around you. But the product never quite found its footing with a mainstream audience, and after nearly four years, Tinder came knocking. 

The seeds for Humin’s acquisition by IAC, the parent company of both Tinder and Match Group, were planted at Web Summit in Dublin in November 2015, where both Ankur and Tinder's co-founder and CEO at the time, Sean Rad, were speakers. The two started discussing how to help people build real-world relationships, and what began as a conversation about potential partnerships became a full acquisition. Humin's intellectual property was folded into Tinder's product roadmap, with Ankur joining as VP of Product in 2016, the only time in his career he would work for someone else. 

Almost two years in, he'd helped turn Tinder into the largest dating app in the world, and by his own account, it was great.

But there's only so much optimization you can do with a swipe left-right platform before the bigger questions start getting louder. He said himself, "It was just time to go back to my roots. How do you solve problems?" 

The answer was waiting for him in SF, in an unexpected form. 

Just after Ankur left Tinder in 2017, a chance encounter made the bigger questions ring louder. Freshly back in SF, he sat down with an investor who, with complete sincerity, pitched a company he believed would change the world. 

It was… a startup that had figured out how to put purses on the blockchain so people could own unique digital handbags. 

This bothered Ankur enough that he couldn't shake it. In his opinion, he saw founders pitching $100 million bets on digital products while real crises such as housing, healthcare, and student debt go largely ignored. He shares how SF is a bubble that he strongly dislikes: 

His answer to break this self-absorbed microcosm was to build a structure for attacking real problems systematically. The seeds of it had been planted years earlier, back in 2008, when he was still a freshman at Wharton, and the financial crisis hit. Overnight, the seniors around him lost their banking and consulting offers.

He looked around at all these smart, suddenly jobless people across campuses at the same time that a college kid could the next big thing in a dorm room. There was Facebook taking off, the iPhone launching a year prior in 2007… 

That realization gave birth to The Kairos Society, a non-profit he founded to do what Y Combinator was doing before YC was really a thing, but for university startups around the world. 

He'd always believed one thing above all else:

Kairos was his attempt to find other talented people who thought the same way. 

It was a fellowship for some of the brightest students from top universities around the world who believed business could be a force for solving real problems, such as energy, education, and health. 

What started as a tight-knit community grew into a global network spanning 55 countries, connecting the young founders with leaders working on the world's biggest issues through events and direct mentorship. He was the founder and chairman of this organization until 2012, when he stepped down to focus on building Humin.

But by 2017, with a clearer sense of what he wanted to build and why, he reworked it into what is now Kairos HQ, a studio and family of brands united by the diagnosis that an entire generation had been set up to fail. 

The company shares how this is the first generation projected to do worse than their parents financially, graduating with mountains of debt, spending nearly half their income on rent, unable to save nor buy, stuck in what Kairos calls “financial purgatory.” The studio's entire reason for existing is to find the places where the system has broken down most visibly for young people and build something better in its place.

As CEO of Kairos, Ankur doesn’t found each company himself. Instead, he brings together entrepreneurs who share that diagnosis and gives them the structure, resources, and network to go after their corner of the problem. 

There’s Rhino, which wants to replace costly security deposits with a low-cost insurance policy, saving renters thousands on move-in costs. Little Spoon aims to make it easier and more affordable for parents to feed their kids well. Then, there’s Alloy, which focuses on helping women going through menopause manage their symptoms. Last, but not least, Cera’s goal is to bring quality home care to aging parents. 

Of all the problems he kept seeing with Kairos, one kept coming back. 

Ankur saw, over and over again, young adults spending a large chunk of their income to pay rent on time every month, but they had no reward whatsoever for this large commitment. 

The more he saw it, the less he could unsee it. So he did what he'd always said you should do when a problem won't leave you alone.

He built a company to solve it. 

That’s the first spark of Bilt, incubated at Kairos.  

For most millennials and Gen Z, payday has a bitter ritual. Two minutes of happiness staring at your balance and then, dollar by dollar, it disappears into the usual suspects, like car payments, student loans, health insurance, utilities, and streaming subscriptions. 

But the one that hurts the most, month after month, is rent.

It’s probably the most reliable financial commitment of your adult life. And yet, when you walk into a bank and try to buy a home, they look at your file and tell you that you don't have enough credit history. There’s no acknowledgment that you've been handing over a third of your paycheck without missing a beat for years. 

"If you pay your rent on time for five years and go to buy a home, they shouldn't say you don't have credit history. That's insane," Ankur would say.

So, he was going to be the one to fix it.

The idea was simple. You pay rent every month on time, so why doesn't it work like every other expense in your life? If you buy a coffee, you earn points. If you book a flight, you earn miles. But somehow you pay your biggest bill, and get absolutely nothing. Over 21 million renter households in the U.S. spend more than 30% of their income on housing, and at the end of it all, there's no reward. 

The original Bilt pitch from 2018 asked, why can't paying rent work like a frequent flyer program? You pay rent on time, earn points that could later be used toward a home down payment, while also building the credit history that would eventually help you buy such a home. After all, if you’ve been paying rent on time for the last five years, shouldn’t that serve as proof of your finances? The idea was to turn renting from a financial dead end into a path to homeownership.

The inspiration for the whole model actually came from a conversation with Barry Sternlicht, chairman of Starwood Capital Group. Barry had told him that airlines and hotels make more profit from their loyalty programs than from flying planes or operating hotels. 

Ankur thought that if that model could be applied to housing, the opportunity was enormous. Barry believed it, too, enough to eventually become the first landlord to sign on, as we will soon see. 

For the moment, Ankur had to roll up his sleeves and get to work to make this idea come to life. 

But he hadn't even properly started when the first "no" arrived. And, it threatened to sink everything before it even began, because it came from the law itself. 

Six months after starting the company around this approach, Ankur received a call from his lawyers. 

The good news? They loved the idea. The bad news? They weren't sure it was actually legal. 

It turns out that post-2008 financial regulations had tightened the rules around what could be used toward a home purchase, and when regulators wrote those guidelines, nobody had considered rewards points. So it wasn’t explicitly permitted… but it wasn’t prohibited, either.

They had two choices. Either build anyway and hope it would never cause any trouble, or fight to get it properly approved. 

Ankur chose the harder path, partly out of principle and partly because, without venture money, he wasn't in a rush (yet). That was only possible because of the Humin exit, which had given him a financial cushion, and he was determined to use it wisely, without answering to anyone. 

That instinct went all the way back to the kid who built a website to barter for a pair of shoes. 

In an interview with Forbes CEO Mike Federle, he'd later put it plainly:

It comes to the idea of money being as much a trap as a tool. 

When you raise venture money early, he would say, you're immediately in a race to show numbers you don't have yet, a kind of ticking time bomb that starts the moment you take it. Ankur wanted the freedom to get it right from the start. He intended to raise eventually, sure, but only from people who had skin in the game for the same reasons he did.

So he spent 18 months up and down from NY to Washington, D.C. meeting with regulators, the Secretary of Housing, and cabinet members at the White House, walking each of them through the same core argument: if Americans can earn rewards at a bar, on a flight, or at a restaurant and use those points to book a hotel room, why on Earth couldn't they use them to build a credit score and toward buying a home?

After 18 months, it finally seemed to have clicked. Regulators told him to submit a formal approval request. 

A week later, a rejection letter arrived in his inbox.

That night, he panicked. His relationships came to the rescue. 

Years of building Kairos and gathering people around real problems had left him with a network deep enough to call at midnight. By the next morning, he was in front of a full committee, appealing the decision in person. It was a reminder that the network you build before you need it is usually the one that saves you. 

This time, it landed. In October 2019, the Federal Housing Administration formally agreed that paying rent on time could now qualify Americans for a home mortgage, and reward points could be used toward a down payment.  

So, what started as a simple question now had a legal answer. Members could earn rewards, build credit, and work toward a lower mortgage rate, all from the bill they were already paying every month. 

With the law on his side, you’d think the biggest obstacle was behind him.

Unfortunately, that was just the beginning. 

They say when one door closes, another one opens. Sometimes that's true, but sometimes everything is closed, and not a damn thing opens, so you have to go there and break it down. 

Stay tuned for Part II, where a global pandemic, of all things, helped turn things around. Clearly, it worked. Better than anyone expected.

Stay tuned.